Job control in computing refers to the control of multiple tasks or Jobs on a computer system, ensuring that they each have access to adequate resources to perform correctly, that competition for limited resources does not cause a deadlock where two or more jobs are unable to complete, resolving such situations where they do occur, and terminating jobs that, for any reason, are not performing as expected.
Job control has developed from the early days of computers where human operators were responsible for setting up, monitoring and controlling every job, to modern operating systems which take on the bulk of the work of job control.
Even with a highly sophisticated scheduling system, some human intervention is desirable. Modern systems permit their users to stop and resume jobs, to execute them in the foreground (with the ability to interact with the user) or in the background. Unix-like systems follow this pattern.
Read more about Job Control: History, Real-time Computing, Job Control Languages
Famous quotes containing the words job and/or control:
“Sometimes the hardest part of my job is the incessant reminder of the fact we’re all trying so assiduously to ignore: we are here temporarily ... life is only ours on loan.”
—Sue Grafton (b. 1940)
“We long for our father. We wear his clothes, and actually try to fill his shoes. . . . We hang on to him, begging him to teach us how to do whatever is masculine, to throw balls or be in the woods or go see where he works. . . . We want our fathers to protect us from coming too completely under the control of our mothers. . . . We want to be seen with Dad, hanging out with men and doing men things.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)